Italian Language and Literature

Sollberger has translated the autobiography of the great Italian flutist, Severino Gazzelloni, a chapter of which will soon be posted on this website. His current interests are focused on the city of Trieste and its literature, Naples and its music and literature, and Southern Italy in general, especially Puglia and Sicily. Living in a small town in the American Midwest as he does, Sollberger is greatly taken with Lucanian poet Franco Arminio's “science of small towns,” paesologia, and sees in it the basis for the future American cognate science of Podunkology. Among the writers he most enjoys reading are Anna Maria Ortese, Claudio Magris, Daniele Del Giudice, Italo Calvino, Giorgio Manganelli, Cesare Pavese, Roberto Bazlen, Dino Buzzati, Roberto Calasso, Giovanni Comisso, Natalia Ginzburg, Emmanuele Trevi, Antonio Tabucchi, Italo Svevo, Giovanni Verga, Giuseppe A. Borgese, Andrea Canobbio, Leonardo Sciascia, Luigi Pirandello, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tomasso Landolfi, Gianni Stuparich and the poets Ungaretti, Saba, Penna, Fortini and Montale.